


Becoming

by spacehopper



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Bloodplay, Blow Jobs, M/M, Post-Ep 101, Tongue Fucking, Xeno
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-18
Updated: 2018-05-18
Packaged: 2019-05-07 23:33:57
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,253
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14681793
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spacehopper/pseuds/spacehopper
Summary: A creature built on lies does not want its truth beheld.





	Becoming

**Author's Note:**

> Warning for spoilers for episode 101.

Jon’s flat hasn’t changed.

There’s dust, to be certain. An air of disuse. But the furniture is where he left it, the detritus of his last meal littering the counter, and the abandoned mug still on the table. But next to it, in a patch of gleaming wood, there’s a notebook, the cover creased and scratched. 

The floorboards creak as he approaches. A Leitner? He plucks it off the table, turns it in his hands, folding back the cover. There’s no bookplate, and this is no book, just cheap paper bound between cardboard. Inside he sees line upon line of cramped text. But that’s not what draws his eye.

Written in a strange, scrabbling hand on the first page are two words, the first clear in stark black slashes, and the second obscured by a spiraling maze of ink. He sits on the sofa and smooths his finger over the page, tracing the distorted letters. S, l, and maybe the trailing tail of a y. 

The first word is Michael, and Jon is not alone. 

“I was going to kill you.” Disappointment snakes through his voice, undercut by something else. Relief? Jon takes a shaky breath, and lifts his head to see Michael in a door that wasn’t there. 

“You?” He lets it hang as he closes the notebook and sets it back in place. “Or Michael?”

Blond curls ripple in an impossible breeze, and that familiar, crooked laugh rings out. And yet. Something is out of place. The voice is clearer but no less chaotic. Michael’s fingers are smooth, but his face is sharp. 

“You want revenge?” No response, though the door seems to flicker behind him. Jon doesn’t look away, weaving his hands together, as if they’ll provide him any protection. “You can have it.” Barely a whisper, but he knows Michael hears. “Gertrude’s gone. But I’m the Archivist.” 

“Hmm.” Michael’s lips waver into a smile. “Better that I kill your Elias. But he’s protected. He’d see me coming.”

Michael doesn’t step. He buckles and glides, displacing the air near Jon. His mouth is warped, and the glinting edges of teeth peek out behind the borders of flesh. 

“So I’ll have to do.” Everything since Helen freed him has been dreamlike, the world gone soft. Perhaps he never left. Perhaps it doesn’t matter. Every door is wrong and every path is terminal. So Jon lets his head fall back.

Closes his eyes.

The fingers that grip his throat are horrifyingly human, flat, soft fingertips pressing into his skin. Is this it? Strangulation seems far too simple for Michael. 

For Michael.

His eyes fly open as blades carve into his cheek, the blood catching on his lip, running into his mouth. He can’t swallow. His throat is closed. The iron tang overwhelms him, and red runs over, staining his chin and dotting the white linen enveloping Michael’s arm. Struggling to speak, but Michael won’t let him. Black splotches cloud Jon’s vision, and his pulse roars in his ears. A creature built on lies does not want its truth beheld. 

But Michael is not only the Distortion. His grip releases, and Jon finds himself bent over, gasping for air. And Michael speaks.

“You’re not like her, you know.” The laughter is still there, because Michael’s mind is bent, wrapped around the whorls of the Spiral. “I thought that’d kill you. I would’ve so enjoyed watching.” The human hand is drawing on his face, painting blood in labyrinthine lines. Fractals, he knows, though he can’t see. 

“But now you won’t?” He can’t quite keep the hope out of his voice. That there is a way out, a glimmering light to follow. Faint and receding, but still within his grasp. More the fool is he. 

Michael leans close. His breath holds an arctic chill, but Jon doesn’t pull away as lips press against his, and a twisted tongue slides into his mouth and laps up the taste of blood. He doesn’t pull free as Michael moves down to his throat, cutting the bruise away with sharp fingers and soft words of concern, once spoken by a dead man. He doesn’t pull back as his shirt is sliced and peeled off his back. 

“I think if you had been the Archivist, I wouldn’t—be.” Curious. Confused. Goosebumps spring up on Jon’s exposed skin. The door is still open. 

“Is that a bad thing?” Words lost under sensation as Michael brushes a hand against his cock, then draws the zipper down. Jon can’t look away as Michael encircles the bare flesh, oddly careful. 

“I’m not sure.” He laughs. “But I never am.” 

Then his mouth is on Jon, and his tongue, long and serpentine. Jon buries his hands in golden hair before he can think better of it, leaving his fingers trapped. 

His cock is enfolded in the twisting caverns of Michael’s mouth as he lures Jon deeper. And it feels—hot and cold, sharp and stinging soft. He drapes an arm over his face, trying to hide his eyes.

And Michael’s lips writhe. Static slashing his skin, and all Jon can do is bite his sleeve and try not to scream. No one would help him. No one can.

Then Michael withdraws, slipping down his length. Jon shudders. Because Michael is still there, tortuous tongue twined around his cock, pressing and playing along his flesh, then wandering ever closer, squeezing his balls with a slick, flexible grip, and oh—

“What are you doing?” Too breathless, language stolen by the creature that isn’t a man that is Michael, whatever of him remains. A limb extends, flat, hard digits digging into his chest, forcing him to slump, back crushed against the cushions. Monstrously uncomfortable, but Jon doesn’t care. 

Michael _speaks_.

The echoing of vibrations of words gouge into his flesh, and he knows, and wishes he didn’t.

Because Michael talks and the Distortion lies and Jon tries to understand as the visions burrow inside him, guides along by Michael’s clever tongue. Michael Shelley hates the Archivist and loves him, has ascended and been subsumed. He has traveled to reaches beyond Jon’s sight. He has never left the halls that weren’t in Sannikov Land. 

And he would kill Jon if he could. But he can’t find the way.

So instead what must be his tongue thickens. Jon groans, and doesn’t try to escape. He should. But if that were his nature, he wouldn’t be the Archivist. Electricity runs through him, and Jon remembers the entity that dogged Mike Crew for so long, something not far removed from Michael. His eyes are open, or perhaps he’s simply unable to not see as his hands are enveloped in cascading loops and whorls of hair, his cock in the folds of that tongue. Michael tightens and expands, and Jon strains, fingers digging into an endless, waving mass. Whatever once was there is lost, and Jon comes, and Jon sees. A vision traced in lines of static, a map, and then—

Michael laughs. 

Jon is alone on the sofa, no evidence of what has passed. If it has passed. But no, Jon knows it has. But it’s distorted. He leans forward, picks up the notebook, and turns it to the first page. The obscuring spirals are gone, and a name is inscribed on the page in a neat hand. Michael Shelley.

“Where does the door go?”

“Nowhere. And everywhere.” Laughter, endless laughter, high and frightened and joyous all the same. Lips brush against his, cold and dead and forgotten. 

And Michael is gone.


End file.
